David F
Powerful images and very little else.
Rated 3.5/5 Stars •
Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars
10/31/23
Full Review
Audience Member
An experimental film that starts out with some promise with sweeping desert shots narrated by some creation myths - but quickly goes downhill after that. Moves on to shots of desert trash heaps, long lingering shots of dead and decaying livestock, people holding animals they trapped up to the camera. Then it's just slow shots of desperately poor areas/people living in trash - then just devolves into hand held footage largely shot out of a moving car idling through dying towns and then throw in 10 minutes of WTF performance art. It mostly feels like it was your grandma's 8mm home travel footage from the 70's - but not in any good or sublime way - more like the kind of painful watching of travel photos that make you wish you were dead by only half way through.
This idea has been done much better later. Just go to youtube and look up 4k videos of the desert and you'll get more out of those with more beauty and transcendence.
Just skip this - it's not worth wasting your time.
Rated 1/5 Stars •
Rated 1 out of 5 stars
01/31/23
Full Review
Audience Member
Werner Herzog has some oddball flicks under his belt. I've seen quite a few, but this is probably the weirdest. He starts of with a plane landing. And landing again. And again. And again. There's probably different planes landing, but that's the intro.
Then we are introduced to part one "Creation", where we see some crazy Saharan shots, often captured from a moving vehicle or stills of dead animals. Also a captured desert fox or something, serving as a pet for a young man is telling a lot of the story here. Some old lady is talking some gibberish over this stuff, and the German language takes away some of the pleasure from the sometimes beautiful shots - creating stories in your head, just by the way the dunes or rocks are shaped.
The next part "Paradise" has some more people involved. It's also a lot of the same here, but with other voiceovers. Some scripted interviews with locals and a goggled biologist holding a giant lizard.
In the last part "The Golden Age" it turns away from most of the natureshots, but more random-like shots of different things. There's even a band here.
This weird little piece is something different from any other film. It does not have that documentary feel, I won't put it in that box. It's interesting, but very, very open. Sure, there are some fingers pointing in directions, but you are all alone here.
You get some songs to go with the pictures at times, often songs from Leonard Cohen. The trivia stands strong here as the crew was imprisoned, and Herzog himself got infested by a blood parasite while jailed.
So, a very expermental film that's hard to rate. If you are in the right state of mind you surely will enjoy it, but even if I wasn't, I did not hate it. It somehow did an impact on me - that's impressive I think.
6 out of 10 dunes.
Rated 3/5 Stars •
Rated 3 out of 5 stars
01/17/23
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Audience Member
http://filmreviewsnsuch.blogspot.com/2016/01/fata-morganalessons-of-darkness.html
Rated 3/5 Stars •
Rated 3 out of 5 stars
02/25/23
Full Review
Audience Member
Like many Herzog films, FATA MORGANA is beautiful in its simplicity, and is both under- and overambitious, making for an interesting experiment along the lines of some of his other work. Herzog conceived this as a science-fiction movie, but as he delved into it realized that the reality he was capturing was stranger than any story he could concoct. In the landscapes of North Africa, he attempts (and succeeds) to film a mirage. But in doing so he also captures the essence of a planet in mortality, and explores the birth, life and death of this rock we call Earth and the effect humans have had on it throughout the years. The film starts gracefully, sweeping over miles and miles of elegant nature to the soft folk tunes of Leonard Cohen as well as a voice over that recites Guatemalan creation myths, but it gets heavy-handed in its final act as Herzog inserts almost Tati-level modernistic satire to his once organic study.
Rated 3/5 Stars •
Rated 3 out of 5 stars
02/11/23
Full Review
Audience Member
An experimental film consisting of footage of people and landscape shot in the Sahara, without a traditional plot. It does have some narration, partly borrowing from the Mayan creation myth, over the footage though. However the narration doesn't work as well with the footage as it could. Some of the footage is very beautifully shot, while some is just dreadfully dull, especially in the first part of the film, which is mostly footage of sand. Overall the film is interesting as a concept, but quite boring in the end.
Rated 2/5 Stars •
Rated 2 out of 5 stars
02/15/23
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